Cultural phenomenon are phenomenon because they come of nowhere. For instance, Charli XCX drops one album last summer and BRAT has come to forever define that ‘it girl’ summer mood. This summer we are all drooling for Labubus. I get the sense the Merry Pranksters were the same way. They were this underground secret society that you probably didn’t know about. Then one day you saw them, Day-Glo being hard to ignore and all, and suddenly they were all anyone was talking about.
As a mid-hippie myself, I was about 20 years too late reading this book but Thomas Wolfe’s scenes have been floating in my awareness for years. As a traveler to many shows and festivals I have been witness to many scenes, but none are so enrapturing to me as the psychedelics.
The first most notable feature of the book: Wolfe’s see-saw perspective. It is generally third person, but some chapters read more like a movie script (which makes sense given the Prankster’s obsession with documenting their lives and sounds, they had rolls and rolls of film on that bus and their communes). Then further along some chapters read like a poem. He will capture a beautiful scene with Ken Kesey, then out of nowhere:
JAHHHHHHHHHHHH
CHUUUUUUUUUUU
Representing a faraway sound or prankster sound, just as Wolfe experienced in the moment. The grand pauses.
But back to the bus. The name is “FURTHER”- some say FURTHUR, but that is an old wives’ tale according to Jerry Garcia’s ex-wife Mountain Girl, a notorious prankster who deserves her own movie. As does Black Maria. By the way, let’s bring back travelling buses! Swap the bring your own beer trolleys for bring your ideas trolley. Let’s start teaching on wheels and ‘havin a grand ol time….’?
Ultimately, the bus became the overarching symbol of the book’s ideals- pushing boundaries and testing what is possible. However even the bus has limits, as did the counterculture revolution. Even Kesey himself said we have to ‘go beyond acid.’ Meaning, we can’t stay on one bus forever, otherwise our routes will run out. Wolfe was expert in capturing this tension, the fractures of the zeitgeist. It was not always utopia and not all pranksters could be in the inner circle, some drifted away, some changed direction, and some, like Kesey, grow disillusioned. This is ever more important in today’s hyper-divided, cult-susceptible world. Can we be free-thinkers and community-oriented?
This book is not going to be everyone’s cup of Kool-Aid. Even I found myself feeling tired in some chapters. Tired in the sense that some of the prankster themes are naturally pretty circular, and as a reader I am accustomed to a linear pace for better or worse…But would I drink the Kool-Aid with those free birds given the chance? Yea I’d take a sip. If you have any interest in music, counter-cultural revolution, free-thinking, and history, this read is certainly worth a gander.
The Capsule 
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